Impeachment is over. November is nine months away. And President Trump is now convinced he’s untouchable.
By failing to impeach Trump, the Democrats have inadvertently bolstered the president’s approval ratings and his self-confidence.
Addressing the Senate’s acquittal vote from the White House, Trump chalked up impeachment as a win: “We were treated unbelievably unfairly,” he said Thursday. “And you have to understand we first went through Russia, Russia, Russia. It was all bullshit. … We ended up winning on Russia, Russia, Russia. It should have taken the one day, as I said, and it took years. Then, Bob Mueller testified. That didn’t work out so well for the other side.”
It’s hard to blame Trump. Many of the Democrats’ allegations over the past few years have been proven false (namely, the Russian collusion theory). Yet every time one of the Democratic narratives fell, another one took its place. Impeachment was supposed to be the final rebuke, but the Democrats wasted it on two half-baked charges: One was ridiculous, and the other was too weak to consider valid.
Now, the Democrats have exhausted what little political capital they had. They knew impeachment would fail given the Senate’s Republican majority but hoped the effort to remove Trump from office would rally voters behind the Democratic banner come November. But this hasn’t happened either: Voters remained largely divided on impeachment throughout the entire process. Public opinion fell along party lines, and few voters in the middle were convinced either way. (Those who were seemed more persuaded by the growing economy than Nancy Pelosi.)
The next eight months will be a continuation of the back-and-forth partisanship between Congress and the White House. But Trump has also suggested that it’s time for payback: House Republicans said this week they will likely try to expunge official records of Trump’s impeachment, and two GOP senators formally requested information about Joe Biden’s and Hunter Biden’s travel histories as part of a Senate probe into Hunter Biden’s business dealings overseas.
There will be much more of this in the days to come, likely at the behest of the president. The GOP won’t discourage him: Many of his congressional allies have already advocated for using the investigation strategy against the Democrats, and those who disagree will look the other way. The Democrats won’t be able to stop him, and they’ll have themselves to blame.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said earlier this week that she hopes Trump has learned from this debacle. I hope she’s right. Trump, of course, dismissed Collins and reiterated that he had done nothing wrong. And in his eyes, the Senate’s “exoneration” proved him right.
Trump didn’t just survive impeachment. He won it. And he’ll be sure to remind the Democrats of that from now until November — and maybe beyond that too.
